MARXISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION 5 Austria, and the demand of the Southern Slavs for independence. With regards Alsace, Engels is categorical: "We are not worthy of the Alsatians, so long as we cannot give them what they now have: a free public life in a great state."7 Describing the resistance of the Ur-Swiss to the Austrian monarchy, he says: "This was the struggle of stubborn shepherds against the onward march of historical development, the struggle of obstinate, rooted local interests against the interests of the whole nation, the struggle of crude ignorance against enlightenment, of babarism against civilisation. They won their victory over the civilisation of the time, ^nd as a punishment they were excluded from all further civilisation."8 As for the Southern Slavs, they criticise the fact that in the blanket demand of independence for all Slavs "there is not a word about the actually existing obstacles to such a universal liberation, or about the very diverse degrees of civilisation and the consequent equally diverse political needs of the individual peoples. The word 'freedom' replaces all that."9 This is the essence of the Marxist approach to the National question. How does it actually affect the mass of people? Docs it benefit them or does it in fact divert them from fighting for their proper interests? They oppose the incorporation of Alsace and Lorraine into Prussia since it wants "to promote the self-development of the nation and fasten the ball and chain of absolutism to its ankle so that it will go ahead more quickly",10 in a period of democratic upsurge all over Europe against absolutist regimes. With regard to the Swiss, they lament the backwardness to which "these simple stiff-necked shepherds" had condemned themselves, pointing out how "from time to time there were too many of them and then the young men went off on their 'travels' i. e. enlisted in foreign armies where they displayed the most steadfast loyalty to the flag no matter what happened. One can only say of the Swiss that they let themselves be killad most conscientiously for their pay."" As regards the Slavs, they concede that all their objections to the Southern Slav movement would have been overridden under one condition: "If at any epoch while they were oppressed the Slavs had begun a new revolutionary history, that by itself would have proved their viability. From that moment the revolution would have had an interest in their liberation, and the special interest of the Germans and the Magyars would have given way to the greater interest of the European revolution."12 The reason is obvious. They, on the basis of their concrete analysis of the development of national movements, could see that "however much the individual bourgeois fights against the others, as a class the bourgeois have a common interest, which is directed against the proletariat inside the country,... (and) ... against the bourgeois of other nations outside the country. This the bourgeois calls his